Steel Plated Heart
by herwhiteknight
Summary: Sarah Manning has walls. She has always had walls. But when a beautiful stranger stumbles into her life, she's given the opportunity to start over.


The rum wasn't enough.

The whiskey wasn't enough.

No amount of alcohol was enough.

It had been enough before, when your pain wasn't singularly attached to a person. When your life was just overwhelmed with impossible circumstances, one after the other. When a little night trip to the bar and several drinks later were enough to drive those buzzing terrors out of your mind for at least one evening.

But now, there are scattered beer bottles at your feet and a half-full (half-_empty_) bottle of some kind of liquor that you never bothered to fully look at, other than it's percentage. And it was over thirty, so you grabbed it with a distraught fist and threw a mouthful back. Hoping that it would help. Hoping that the pain would run far _far far, so far, _from you.

It wasn't enough. Nothing would ever be enough.

Because you had felt her touch, her comforting arms, her soft fingerpads drawing designs onto your skin in moments of passion. You've been heated by the soft strokes of her tongue, by the breath of her lips, the gasp of your name as she comes undone.

You've been reforged by the simplicity of her presence in your life, the way she shapes your habits, your words, your heart. Her soft attitude is a hammer to the steel of your armored heart, beating and pounding and eventually denting the metal you've been hiding behind for so long. And you should be terrified, _she's tearing down your walls, your everything no one has seen you without walls before, _but you're not. She's carving intricate designs into the newly formed metal and the words _I love you _are etched forever into your heart. And how can you deny such a gentle touch?

But you did. You're not sure why, or even how, it happened. Perhaps she was too enthusiastic, tried to tap too fiercely into your armor. You know she meant well; she was carving hearts and dreams and comfort into your steel-plated heart. But she came too close, too close. She scraped and she sawed and she _saw. _She saw you, your heart, as it really was.

Red. Raw. Angry. Screaming.

Of course you ran. _Of course _you did. She saw you as you really were and you were terrified. You _are _terrified. So of course you ran, _of course. _You ran before she did, before she _would. _Because it was only the inevitable, of course. Everyone else ran, everyone else you allowed to apply too much pressure, to dig too deeply into your arms. They took off. So you ran before she did, because she would. She _would. _Of course she would.

...so why didn't she?

When you looked back from where you were panting, from where your hands on your knees were resting.. she hadn't moved. Not an inch. Still there, she was standing, still there. With a chisel and hammer in hand and a slightly excited expression soured only by her confusion, as if she had expected to find more of you beneath the steel, but was left without a craft to work on.

After your head-on collision with someone who had been certainly _different _than all the rest, you tried to forget. Because that was what you were best at. Forgetting. Patching. Reforging. Forgetting. Covering up the love bites and the carved kisses and pretending that they were scars. Pretending that they were things that made you tough, that made you continue to _be. _Cover them up and forget that _this time, _certainly this time, they were none of those things. That those marks lead you on a journey to your other half. Those marks were thing that finally proved to you that you were nothing on your own. That she completed you the way no one else had.

Because _she didn't run. _She didn't run and she never would. And you had looked back only long enough to confirm it, to realize that simple fact. That she didn't run. That she would only run if it were to chase you. To chase after you. To carve new holes in your sternum, to crack open the enigma that she believed you were.

You didn't want her to know. You didn't want anyone to know. Because if someone knew, then they would turn it back on you. They would reveal the horrors you never knew that you possessed and they would turn them to you, like a sick kind of puppet show and saw that these demons existed. And they existed inside _you. _

And you never wanted to know what your demons were.

So, even though the whiskey wasn't enough, and the rum wasn't enough to drown your endless thoughts, you drink anyways. Alone, in a cold bed, in a dark, freezing, endless room, you drink hoping that it will fill you finally. Fill you the way that one simple touch from her lips had filled you.

But it wouldn't be enough. Nothing, nothing but her, would ever be enough.


End file.
